botox is not the answer

My aunt Clorinda has been crying a lot lately. Her life has become a regimented passing of hours, half, quarter hours. Her days are spent administering just the right mix of pills at the right times, synchronizing their taking effect with the consumption of food. She has taken to throwing back a Nexium-Propulsid-Cisaprede cocktail, washing it down with a gulp of liquid that seems to splash off some inner surface and return, a backwater that pools in her eyes. I can't take the uncertainty she says.

I try to remember this when I arrive at her apartment to take her to the day's doctor appointments. What the hell is that? she says opening the door. It's my little red corvette, I tell her, ignoring the bitchiness in her voice and rolling my bicycle into the den. Don't bring it here again she barks. It's a bike, not a pitbull, I bark back. I can see her mentally taking inventory of the furniture and decorative items in her apartment that I could potentially ruin. The antiques, the Waterfords, the rugs. Don't get the tires near the chair she says.

I am early. We are watching Emeril on the food network on the television in Clorinda's bedroom. She says that his recipes are terrible, for people who don't know how to cook. Not to mention the fact that his English is atrocious. I assume she is referring to his Fall River, Massachusets accent. It sounds more like Brooklyn to me. He is not what my aunt would call refined. I change the channel. Some senator for some state is talking about something. What a jerk she says. Just turn it off.

We pass the wooden horse sculptures on Park Avenue. Whoever did that sure was fond of horses Clorinda says. Probably not I think. The same way Monet probably didn't care that much about waterlillies, the same way Van Gogh probably wasn't in love with hay or the stars, or daisies in a vase. I tell her that I am going to the taping of the Martha Stewart show next week. Clorinda remarks that she is pretty clever, for a Polack. Driver, she says, I wanna get out on the near side. Driver? My aunt is talking to the cabbie with the same manner in which she still calls black people colored and asians orientals. Driver, we'll get out here, she says. Driver. It sounds obtuse and rude. He's not your fucking chauffeur I want to tell her. But then I realized that he is her fucking chauffeur. I picture the man on the other side of the partition wearing white gloves and a hat. Instead he is wearing some sort of a turban, jabbering in an imperceptible language on his hands-free cell phone.

In the waiting room at the audiologist's Rinda starts to cry. Nothing loud or dramatic, just quiet sobs of frustration. Don't cry I say. I hand her a tissue and methodically touch the cardboard ad for Botox on the side table. Suddenly I am thinking of a vacation my family took to Aruba 10 years ago. Altogether I'd say we, as a family, have been to Aruba 6 or 7 times. Over the years we became friendly with other families who had been there 6 or 7 times. The same people during the same weeks of winter time share. In the waiting room I began thinking of the day we arrived in Aruba, that time, 10 years ago. We ran into my mother's friend Gelsa from Jersey in the lobby of Aruba Beach Club while we were signing out towels. She and my mother hugged. They quickly asked what the other had been up to. Gelsa mentioned a friend whom she had recently lost to cancer. She then welled up and froze, choking on the words. I still can't talk about it she said. In the waiting room I then look at my aunt and say the dumbest thing I have ever uttered. There's always botox.